1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a Chinese herb composition and, more particularly, to a Chinese herb composition suitable for treating hepatitis.
2. Description of Related Art
Chronic liver diseases (such as chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis, and liver cancer) have been a major cause of deaths in humans for centuries. The liver diseases include viral liver disease, alcoholic liver disease, drug or toxicant-caused liver disease and metabolism disorder liver disease. In the world, about 350 million people are chronic B type hepatitis carriers, and 2.7 million people are chronic C type hepatitis carriers. In Taiwan, the B type hepatitis carrier rate is about 15 to 20% of the population and the C type hepatitis carrier rate is about 2 to 4% of the population. Therefore, there is a serious demand for effective treatment of these diseases. The present medicines for treating hepatitis, such as liver protecting drugs, antiviral drugs or immune regulators, certainly have curative effects, but they also have side effects and are expensive. For example, the interferon and lamivudineare used for treating B type hepatitis. The interferon, which were approved by the FDA in 1992 for treating B type hepatitis, have only a 20% positive response but also have severe side effects. On the other hand, lamivudine, which was approved by the FDA in 1998 for treating B type hepatitis, also has only a 17 to 33% positive response. Furthermore, Lamivudine™ easily causes the mutation of B type hepatitis virus and thus reduces the potency of the treatment.
In reference to traditional Chinese medicine, hepatitis is usually treated with a prescription of herbs and other natural ingredients, however the potency is too variable and thus unreliable. These shortcomings may be due to a lack of common scientific standards among the practitioners. Thus, there is a long, unfulfilled need for a reliable and inexpensive medication to cure and prevent common liver diseases, and which further is not accompanied by side effects experienced with existing medications for liver ailments. The present invention provides a composition for curing various forms of hepatitis found in a human body, and a novel process of the same.
Traditional Chinese medicines are usually extracted by water decoction, but this method cannot obtain enough active components. In addition, the active components will lose their activity at high decocting temperatures. Many processes for preparing liver protecting drugs have been disclosed in, for example, Patents CN 1194840, CN 1110151, CN 1136941 and CN 119540. However, the prior arts use complex materials and traditional processes, which do not overcome the above problems (i.e. loss of activity). Alternatively, Patents JP 6322116, JP 58183623, U.S. Pat. No. 5,529,778 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,145,955 disclose processes, which utilize organic solvents, such as methanol, acetone and chloroform, to extract the active components. However, these organic solvents are toxic and need to be removed completely, or they will harm human bodies.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a novel process for preparing the composition for liver protection, and the effective components of said product are higher than those found in existing traditional medicines. There are more active substances and good curative effects, but no toxic organic solvents are involved in the process and thus harmful side effects found in using existing medicines are absent from the present invention.